MLB Attendance Analysis

For the last three days I have blogged about Major League Baseball.  Today I want to focus on MLB fan behavior by looking at MLB team regular season attendance.  To do this, I grabbed the data off of ESPN’swebsite.  The 2017 & 2018 data can be found here.  So let’s look at the 2018 regular season attendance data.  First, a total of 69,649,736 attended (or at least bought tickets) to regular season MLB games this past season.  The LA Dodgers had the highest total attendance (3,857,500 fans) and the Miami Marlins had the lowest total attendance (811,104 fans).  The average number of fans over the season was 2,321,658, with a standard deviation of 742,203.

Compared to the previous season, overall attendance at MLB regular season games was down by over 3 million fans with the largest declines by Toronto (-878,605) and Miami (-840,893).  Those two franchises represent over half of the total decline in MLB regular season attendance alone.  The average decline in fan attendance was (-100,690) from the previous season.  So, was this a (statistically) significant decline in MLB attendance?  To answer that question, I will use a t-test, which is a statistical measure of the relationship between two variables and then allows one to determine the degree of confidence that the two variables have to each other.  The t-test for regular season team attendance from the 2017 to 2018 seasons results in 0.0954.  The standard threshold for a t-test to be statistically significant is 0.0500.  Thus since the t-test is above 0.0500, I conclude that while the change in regular season team attendance declined from 2017 to 2018, it did not decline in a statistically significant manner.